Secretary Wong Sio Chak | ‘Police did not breach the law’ in Senado Square crackdown

Secretary for Security Wong Sio Chak (second from right)

There may be many views on the events of the night of August 19, but Secretary for Security Wong Sio Chak said he is certain about one thing: “The police did not breach the law” during their Senado Square operation.

Dozens of police officers were deployed in Senado Square and the surrounding streets that night to prevent an illegal protest from taking place. Officers briefly detained about 20 to 30 people to be searched in a nearby car park on Rua da Sé, but none were arrested.

During a press conference held yesterday to present the crime report for the first half of the year, the Secretary provided a full explanation of his views on the case as well as the justification that the Public Security Police Force (PSP) had provided for declining to approve the public gathering requested for that evening.

“According to the law, the police can request any person to present identification and also can request the person to go to a police station for an inquiry,” Wong said in response to media questions, adding “of course the person can contact his family or his lawyer but if the person does not want [to do so], we cannot force them.”

The Secretary added that the police also have internal instructions regarding this process, refuting the accusations that the police failed to provide information to at least some of the seven people that were taken in for further questioning on the evening of August 19 in Senado Square.

Wong noted that all seven of the people taken in for questioning were released from the police within the six-hour period as stated in the law.

“So there was no breach of the law. All was done according to the law,” he said, noting that the president of the Macau Lawyers Association, Jorge Neto Valente, with whom the Secretary admitted to being a close friend, had expressed the same opinion. According to Wong, Valente had concluded that the police’s actions were “handled in a normal way.”

The Secretary took the opportunity yesterday to justify the joint operation held on August 19. “The right of public gathering and demonstrating is enshrined in the Basic Law as well as in the Law 2/93/M. In 2018, this law was amended but was only in what concerns to institution changes and not on content.”

Wong noted that although the right of gathering and demonstration is enshrined in the laws of Macau, such laws also establish several restrictions to such activities, namely the fact that “demonstrations cannot be authorized for purposes that are against the law.”

In such cases, the authorities can refuse to grant permission to demonstrations, “because we have the duty to protect public security and tranquility.”

The Secretary also cited Portuguese scholars who acknowledged that the evaluation of which demonstrations should or should not be authorized need to take into account “the aims and purposes of such activities as well as which kind of messages are transmitted during such event, times and places of the events, and a forecast on the influence of the events to public order.”

During the same press conference, Assistant Commissioner of the PSP, Lao Wan Seong, clarified that the demonstration at Senado Square was not authorized because of several aspects, including the date and location.

“The fact that they requested August 19 and Senado Square [caused complications] as we know that August is a peak month for tourists and the Square has many people. Adding to that, it coincided with the works of decoration for the mid-autumn festival.”

These facts led to the decision to consider the location as inappropriate.

Lao also added that the purposes expressed in the request were regarding a connection with the Hong Kong protests, some of which are considered illegal in the neighboring region, and therefore violates the requirement of demonstration purposes being lawful.

Commenting on the same topic, Wong noted that in their request the organizers said that they wanted to protest against “illegal police actions” in Hong Kong. He claimed that there was no evidence for this assertion.

“In fact, there were several court decisions in Hong Kong that state otherwise, which creates the assumption that the demonstration’s motive is potentially defamatory, therefore being considered illegal by its nature,” Wong said.

The Secretary was at odds with
the fact that, according to him, the demonstration’s “purpose was to ‘legalize’ the actions of the protesters in Hong Kong, which have been considered illegal.”

Wong also said that police forces were concerned with the fact that in Macau the population might hold a “different point view from Hong Kong people,” and that counter-protests could form leading to a risk of confrontation and even physical conflict. It was because of this risk, he said, that the security forces had deployed a large number of police officers to Senado Square that evening.

“We had information that some people had expressed an interest in gathering in the Square, even though the demonstration was not authorized, and we also knew that there was a group of people that were preparing to go to that same location to counter-protest, and this is why PSP decided to bring the police operation forward in order to guarantee the security of the population,” he said.

The Secretary also referred on several occasions to the police procedures and laws on the matter that have been unchanged for several decades, and that come from the Portuguese administration before the handover.

Replying to questions regarding the way people were dressed, particularly on how the color of their garments was used as a reason to search them, Wong refuted the idea that there was a correlation. He said that, of the seven people taken in for questioning, not all of them were wearing clothes of the same color.